A thousand miles from friends, family and all that's familiar to him, Mississippi trucker Robert Earl Carney sits alone and afraid in Lehigh County Prison.

He's been held here on $1 million bail since May 22, when he plowed a tractor trailer across five Pennsylvania counties with his two children in the cab, pursuing a $1,000 bonus for hauling a load of onions from coast to coast in three days.

At a preliminary hearing in Lehigh County Court today, about 70 witnesses are expected to testify against Carney, who faces 118 charges, including seven counts of attempted homicide and driving under the influence of methamphetamines.

Police said what he did was reckless and dangerous.

Carney said he did what he did out of desperation.

He said he needed the money to cover debts and mend a marriage frayed by financial woes. He needed the job to provide for his family.

Worried and weeping in navy blue prison fatigues last week, Carney, 31, said he feared he might already have lost the family he was working hard to keep.

His wife, Shonda, 30, who publicly pledged her devotion to him, has accepted only one of his near daily calls from prison in the past four weeks.

"I loved Shonda for 15 years, but I get to thinking about this and I get mad," Carney said. "I feel she betrayed me."

Shonda left Pennsylvania on June 2 to be with her grandmother, who was in a Mississippi hospital with terminal cancer, Carney said. With her went the children, Magen, 11 and Tyler, 3, who were in the truck when Carney allegedly rammed police cars, ran down road signs and roared past construction workers in Cumberland, Dauphin, Lebanon, Berks and Lehigh counties.

Shonda jumped out of the rig and called police at the first sign of trouble when Carney's truck rolled backward into a car in Camp Hill, Cumberland County.

After Carney's arrest, area Good Samaritans paid for Shonda and the children to stay in a Fogelsville motel for 11 days. Well-wishers contributed $14,000 into an account in Shonda's name at a New Tripoli bank.

Carney said Shonda told him the account raised about $5,000. He said he heard from relatives that the balance was much higher and that Shonda bought a car and put a deposit on a mobile home in her hometown of Quitman, Miss.

He said he expected Shonda to use part of the money to pay off about $2,500 in fines and restitution that Carney owes on fraud and embezzlement charges in Lauderdale County, Miss.

Shonda did not respond to The Morning Call's numerous requests for an interview.

As for the bonus: Bill Head, owner of the trucking company that hired Carney early in May, said none was offered. He said Carney stood to make about $700 on the cross-country run.

Carney said he doesn't remember the last leg of the mad rush to deliver onions to Goshen, N.Y. Tired from lack of sleep, delirium set in when another trucker spiked his coffee with "road dope" in Virginia, he said.

After saying he has never taken drugs, Carney admitted in a prison interview to a cocaine addiction about five years ago. But he maintained he didn't take methamphetamines on the onion run. The last time he took them was on the road a year and a half ago to stay awake, he said.

Lehigh County District Attorney Robert Steinberg contends Carney had an excessive amount of methamphetamines in his system when he was arrested near the Summit Lawn exit on Interstate 78.

No one was injured, but Steinberg said Carney's stunt put thousands of people in jeopardy.

Sitting in prison, black plastic rosary beads around his neck, Carney shook his head at how close he came to catastrophe.

"You don't run 90 miles at 85 mph in a truck loaded with 80,000 pounds of onions without hurting yourself or somebody else without the help of Jesus," Carney said, clutching the crucifix at the end of the beads. "It just can't be done."

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Grandson of a Baptist preacher, son of a log hauler, the ninth of 11 children, Carney grew up poor in the timber-rich town of York, Ala.

Things were unstable from the time he was born to parents whose marriage ended when Carney was 2.

His father, Carson Carney, remarried soon after the divorce. Carney was raised by his father and stepmother in a sparsely furnished house. The dining room had no table or chairs, so meals were taken on the porch and in the living room.

Carney's mother, Lois Steele, battled unsuccessfully in court for two years for custody of the children. She settled in Georgia, making several trips a year to see them. She said she was bothered by their lifestyle.

"They just had to work real hard down there," Steele said. "None of them had time for any fun."

Carney said he started working in his father's timber business when he was about 7.

"We were poor but daddy always made sure we had food to eat and clothes to wear," Carney said. "He always gave us an opportunity to work. If you worked, he paid you."